If you lived through the 90s, then you’ll either have owned a tonne of Pogs or at least seen people playing with them. It was a global phenomenon spreading from playground to playground and every bit as big as the other collectibles of the time like Pokémon cards and GoGo Crazy Bones. In fact, it pre-dates them both, making it one of the first collectible games to take the world by storm.
As 90s kids ourselves, we loved having the chance to interview the Pog Unlimited team on the Retrospect Podcast, learning all about the resurgence of Pogs and bringing Pogman back to modern audiences. We chatted with CEO & Co-Owner of POG Unlimited and The World Pog Federation Julien Savino, celebrated illustrator Brent Scotchmer who is running up all the artwork for the new Pogs, CEO & Co-Founder of Pog Digital Kyler Frisbee, & the driving force behind the Hobby Box & Social Media Marketing Natalie Peyton. This is the biggest Podcast interview we’ve done in terms of having a whole team on the record, so look out for each person’s name before and head back up here to double-check their job title if you get a little lost!
As always, this interview is made from parts of the podcast transcript. You can listen back to the full episode here or by checking out the player at the bottom of the article to put a voice to a name and hear the episode in full! But for now, join Brandon, Me, and the Pog team for an interview filled with 90s nostalgia!
Grab A Pog Hobby Box here using our Affiliate Link and support Retro Dodo with every purchase!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know The Pog Unlimited Team
Retro Dodo: Thanks for joining us guys, let’s start off by introducing yourselves and what you do for the company.
Kyler: My name is Kyler Frisby, I’m lucky enough to have partnered with Julian to get to bring the Pog world to the digital side. So our business is building out digital collectibles, games, and kind of expanding the Pog universe into the Internet side.
Brent: I’m Brent Scotsma. I am an illustrator from Perth, Western Australia. I’ve worked for big trading card companies like Tops and Upper Deck and worked on franchises like Star Wars and the Garbage Pile Kids and The Walking Dead. And about three years ago, I was brought over by the Pog team to help build assets for their video game platform and their digital collectibles, and also their physical collectibles. You know, Pogs and Slam is back in real life for the first time in a long time.
Natalie: Hey, everyone. I’m Natalie Payton. I’m in Austin, Texas, and I’m heading up the Hobby Box Marketing, the first launch back into the ether for Pogs in the first time in 30 years. I come from a toy marketing and social media marketing background, and also have a toy brand of my own, not a toy brand, a child’s podcast brand of my own. So, happy to be here on the team.
Julien: Hi, I’m Julien, and I’m the owner of Pog Unlimited. I acquired this company back in December 19, and with a strategy and with a will, a strong will to bring Pog back in every force. So we do cardboard, and we do digital. And what is very important to us is also to bring the Pogman character back in people’s mind and in a kid’s mind, and through probably entertainment.
About Pogs
RD: I guess for some of the readers who don’t know about Pogs or who didn’t live through the phenomenon the first time around, we should probably get a little bit of the history behind the brand.
Julien: You know between 1994 and 1998, Pog and Limited sold 10 billion Pogs within 30 countries.
RD: Damn, 10 billion.
Julien: 10 billion. And they created that, I mean, they developed the character, like the Pogman character, with very brilliant illustrators. And then they also had that idea of developing, well, the Pog series with many cartoon characters, movie characters like Poghoun, Taz, Bobby.
Julien: Well, at the very beginning, Pog was a game, a gameplay that was invented by kids. It was invented by kids from Hawaii who were actually upcycling their milk bottles. Because like every American kid, they were delivered a bottle of milk, like a glass bottle of milk, every morning on their doorstep. And they had this idea of tearing off the cardboard disc that was inside the metal cap. And there was a milk dairy logo on this cardboard disc. And they were collecting the dairy logo.
Julien: And then they invented the gameplay. Taking things back further, it has links to Menko. Menko is an endemic game from Japan back in the 90s century. So I think, and probably because there was a Japanese community in Hawaii as well, there is something like that. But it was like a game. It was gambling as well because the gameplay that we all love, which is basically that you can lose your game, was invented there. And then back in the 50s, we had, still in Hawaii, a marketing executive who had to launch a, he was working for Dairy, and he had to launch a mixed fruit juice made of passion fruits, like pea, orange, like oat, and guava, so like tea. And then, and his aim was to launch his brand, like Pog, the Pog brand, the Pog juice.
Julien: And then the gameplay that was called ‘the milk cap game’ became generically called the Pog game. But the brand was owned by this milk dairy. And then, in the 90s, Alan Rypinski, a seasoned entrepreneur from California, came to Hawaii for some holidays, and he started dating a school teacher, actually. And the school teacher, she was using in her classroom the pop from her youth when she was in the 50s. And this guy was just a… He was a trading card collector, and he discovered the gameplay with his girlfriend, and then he understood the gameplay.
Creating Artwork For Pogs
RD: Do you work with a bunch of different artists? Are there unique collaborations? And what’s the process now with Pogs with regards to the art? Because obviously, you have to kind of stick to a certain level of nostalgic design with Pogman. Is there anything different moving forward with regards to the art?
Julien: That’s a very tricky question. At that time, we had a designer in the US, and the designer was providing from the US, and mainly the company, like the licensee, like Wellington in the UK, were taking. My father was the licensee for pog in France and Spain and Italy at that time. So, I didn’t play Pog, but I was graduating from a business school at that time. So, when I came back on the weekend, I say I experienced that craze from the inside. And actually, my father had an art background and he had a very good friend of his and he created a lot of pog from this time, and because in France, the market was so dynamic that they had to create more than the US could provide.
Julien: And it was from the beginning, it was my aim to kind of find the illustrator who would be able to create and to get that pop 90s kind of draw. And I would say that, I mean, when we started, Kyler was desperate to find some artwork… because to feed the beast of Twitter and to make sure that he had enough stuff. And one day he called me and he said, you know, I’ve got a guy, he’s doing very good draws. And I was a little bit sceptical at that time. And he said, you know, he’s living in Perth… and again I was a little bit sceptical. And one day we had a call. It was 6 a.m. in the morning. And then we get, he introduced me to Brent.
RD: So Brent, are you getting into a specific mindset when you’re doing these new designs? Are you just thinking, ‘How can I top what I saw as a kid?’ Or are you just keeping in that line of, ‘Let’s just keep this level of weirdness going?’ How do you even get into the mindset of a character like Pogman when you’re doing these kinds of different designs… and is that a dangerous thing for you or anyone to be doing considering how crazy he is!
Brent: Yeah, well, look, I was so lucky in that, when it was all kind of official and I was brought on, is that I said to Kyler, what have we got? What have we got as far as assets go? And Kyer goes, well, I’ll give you this. And he gave me this massive file of hundreds and hundreds of pencil drawings of Pogman that at the time maybe had never been used. And I was as a collector, as like someone who has just, you know, Jackpot. I get to essentially just build, like every time I do something with Pogman, it’s just like, it’s like a build-a-bear. Like I get to build Pogman from the ground up using these.
RD: That’s so cool.
Brent: We’re so lucky. So like everything that you see, well, not everything, you know, some stuff I do is 100% original, but a lot of what you see that we do with Pogman is actually literally derived from an illustration that may have been done in the 90s, but no one’s seen it before. So I get to, I get to pull it in, clean it up, make it nice and smooth and crisp and clean and make sure all the colors are correct and make it sort of not so scratchy sketchy and more, you know, kind of polished.
Brent: I have an incredible archive that I kind of safeguard that I can pull from anytime we need. My job essentially is to protect the character, like to make sure that he stays in that 90s feel that we don’t try to do anything too wacky with him. We’re not trying to like… make him into this 3D claymation thing or whatever. It’s for the Pogs themselves and stuff.
Brent: We want it to just feel like you’re in 2024 and you’re playing the video game or you’re in a pack of Pogs and it looks just like it looked in the 90s and it should have that feel. Even if we’ve got Pogman doing modern things, it should still kind of have that 90s feel and my history working with trading card companies and licenses and stuff gives me the skill to be able to navigate the lines between what isn’t and isn’t acceptable and I’m lucky Julian is very open with Pogman.
What Pogs Mean To The Team
RD: To be working this diligently on bringing back a 90s icon for a new generation, you must live and breathe everything Pogs. Did they have a big impact on you as a child?
Kyler: Getting to work every day feels like I’m playing a game, right? We’re building a playground for all of us millennials to come back together to reconnect around this amazing brand. And what the brand represents is childhood, community, friendship, connection, and collectibility. And, you know, you could get really sappy about all the people who maybe didn’t feel like they fit in when they were kids and Pog was the thing that connected them to their peers, you know, and when you’re young, you don’t realize how important that is.
Kyler: But looking back, you’re like, man, that was like when my social life started to blossom, when I started to make friends that I’d hang out with on a daily and, you know, learn to socialize and negotiate and would bite my upper lip and not have my mom knock on your door if you stole my favorite Pog. We learned how to grin and bear it most of us. So the lessons you learn on the blacktop playing ‘Pogs for Keeps’ really was formative, right? And to get to now come together with a world-class team, I don’t know if there’s a better person for the chairs that each of these folks is sitting in. It’s almost like Julien is bringing something back for so many people. And that is such an amazing thing, right? And he’s let us, a lot of the tech be built in a way that we really believe.
Brent: Well, you know what? We wouldn’t be able to, the product wouldn’t be, we wouldn’t be meeting in all corners of the earth all the time and flying around the place and running and helping run tournaments and doing all of these things. If we didn’t truly really care about it, this isn’t just like, this isn’t someone who picked up the licensing rights for Pog and just thought, this is a quick way to make money. We’re talking about hand-picked people.
The Hobby Box
Pogman is back! @poggameofficial are bringing back the 90s playground phenomenon with their new Hobby Box, a collectors set packed full of nostalgia that takes us straight back to our youth. With new artwork, classic designs, and scenes with Pogman from the 90s that have never… pic.twitter.com/uVk9EA9na3
— Retro Dodo (@retro_dodo) October 4, 2024
- Price: £93.00/$119.00
- In The Box: 12 packs of POGs (8 in each), A limited edition KINI slammer, serial number parallels for POG Digital platform.
- Available From (AFF): POG Unlimited
Julien: So with this hobby box, we are celebrating a 30-year jubilee of Pog. And we wanted to do something not for kids, but for adults, for Poggers. And we wanted to give as much value as we could to collectors and to players. So Pog was not a hobby business back in the 90s. It was a kid’s business. If one day we launch, and we will do that, but when we will launch that, the Pog as a kid’s business, it means that Pogman will be on screen.
Brent: The way that the hobby box worked is we wanted Pog to be… We wanted Pog for the first time to be treated the same way that people would buy a box of baseball cards, right? So people buy, you know, or Star Wars or whatever it is, is that it’s not just the cards with the images on it. You know, there are real value things that you can find in it. And so just like you might find like a short printed numbered parallel of a card or a, you know, in a Pokemon world, like a shiny version or something, or an alternate artwork sort of version or something, we wanted to for the first time, because the average collector for Pog is sort of like, well, I’m 40, just over 40. So, you know, when I’m buying these sorts of things, I’m like, well, what’s in it for me?
Brent: So we started brainstorming these ideas, all us together, me, Julian, and Kyler about, you know, what would make this attractive to like the serious collector. And so we started to come up with things like, definitely short printed parallels. There are Pogs in these boxes that you can find where only 99 of them were printed. And so that instantly gives you some sort of rarity, something that you can hold on to, something that you wouldn’t play with, definitely wouldn’t let your kids touch it, you know, or you hand it down to them, or you send it off for grading, or you, whatever it is, right? So we have short printed parallels in a gold or red and a green version.
Brent: So there is a… there are slammers that there are only four hundred and thirty of these things. They’re a heavy solid metal slammer that has been carefully coated in a 22-karat gold leaf. And that leafing is done by one of the top guilders in Europe. She works with royalty. She works in historical places, anything that’s priceless and timeless. She’s probably worked on it. And just like priceless and timeless, Pogs as well. So we really like being able to have some fun with it. And the images on the Pogs are, you know, because this was the first release in a long time, you know, they pay homage to the classic stuff.
Marketing To Gen Z
RD: How are you going to market this whole brand to modern audiences? Because as a 90s kid, I feel quite overwhelmed with the amount of nostalgia that’s come out over the recent years. You’ve got Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, Pokémon. You’ve got all of the Sega movies now, the Nintendo movies. Every character seems to be coming out and fighting for all of our attention. How is Pogman going to get his dirty little hands into our brains, so to speak? And his bare butt apparently by what we’ve seen on the Pogs so far!
Natalie: There you go. I’ll start by just talking about the Hobby Box. And we’ve been incredibly impressed with the amount of creators that have come out of the woodwork to get in touch with us. Like I’ve never been one of those girls who got slid into her DMs, but the amount of DMs that are being slid into the Pog game official accounts with really excited fans.
RD: You’ve also been doing the stuff on the Pog Instagram though, right? You’ve been kind of connecting with old and new Pog fans on social media. How have you found that? I think I’ve seen you on a giant Pogs Playmat in a car park throwing slammers down, is that right?
Natalie: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We have like, I don’t know what it is in centimeters or meters, but it’s like a four or five-foot diameter Pog mat. So it’s 160-something feet. But our Instagram approach has really been to try to open up the eyes to a huge generation that has no idea what Pogs are, and that is Gen Z. Gen Alpha, who are the kids of the millennials, are maybe being introduced to the brand through their parents at their hardcore nostalgia or just love hanging on to their old things, mostly in their parents’ attics. But Gen Z has done a really good job.
Natalie: We have some partners that help me with social media, and they come up with great ideas and keep us on trend. So not only are we… It’s sort of a juxtaposition between our old 90s nostalgia brand that was around right as the internet was coming up, and we were all getting addicted to AIM, AOL Instant Messenger.
Natalie: What we do is we try to bring back a great brand with our passion, and we have a strategy, and the strategy is very clear, but we are not a big corp. And so what is the most important thing is to have fun all together, to meet great people, and things happen like that. So we launch a brand, but it’s not a brand launch, actually. We are just the caretaker of something that exists in people’s hearts. And the difference, you talk about all these revival stuff, and people like Sega and blah, blah, blah. But the big difference between Pog and everybody, all the other brands, is that Pog completely disappeared in just five years. So, if you look at the reaction on social media when we post something, it’s always the same. It’s someone poking someone else. Because ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-crushes, sisters, brothers, cousins, they want to connect them to the people they were playing with.
Pogman’s Adventures In Web 3
RD: One of the new features in the world of Pog is the digital platform. Julien & Kyler, do you want to go into that side of the business a little more for us?
Julien: When I first acquired that company, there was a licensing agreement going on with a UK company that was, and it was signed before I acquired the company. And this UK company was like a startup, and they wanted to do a video game based on augmented reality. So the idea was you have your phone, you scan your Pog, your physical Pog, and then you have a digital Pog, and then you can play with it, blah, blah, blah. And the partnership didn’t go anywhere. They just had like an Indiegogo kind of stuff.
Julien: To me, augmented reality is not the right technology for Pog, was not the right technology for Pog, because we are the game you collect. It was the perfect technology for Pokémon, because Pokémon has caught them all. So Pokemon, the DNA of the brand… of the Pokémon brand is a quest. So when Niantic and Google came with that wonderful technology, saying, I can put a digital asset anywhere in the world, like on a cafe, in a house… when they came with that wonderful technology of putting a digital asset anywhere in the world, then the match with the Pokémon game DNA was perfect, because then you would create true augmented reality. You would create a worldwide quest of Pokemon. So it makes Pokemon go.
Julien: It was just perfect. But then for the game you collect, we had to find the technology that helps to collect, that is real, that gives a digital, a real collectible value. And that’s the Web3, because it’s a code and because your asset is really a single asset and cannot be duplicated. And it really is very advanced in the technology world for people to be able to build in the way that they’ve already been building for years. I think the product, a great way for people to get involved, if for any reason you’re not able to afford a collectible digitally or a box physically or whatever, you can’t find them on the internet. Jump into hub.pogdigital.com.
Kyler: It’s a free-to-join platform where you can connect your socials and start questing. You can earn points and start ripping packs on day one, and each of those packs contains anything from $1,000 to $2,000 digital collectible. They contain some of these hobby boxes and packs, so you’ll be able to get physical items just by being a part of the digital Pog community.
Kyler: Again, no purchase is necessary, free-to-join, free-to-play game, and you have the opportunity to work your way up the leaderboard, earn coins that can be redeemed directly for all of these physical items that you’re looking at and that you’re excited about, and the opportunity for us to continue to grow the digital legacy of Pog. So jump in for free and get involved. There’s absolutely no risk. We won’t ever ask you for anything. You don’t have to have a Web3 wallet, just an email, and you can start collecting in the digital space physical and digital items and some unique experiences only available to Poggers.
Thanks to the Pog Unlimited team for joining us from all over the globe to talk about one of our childhood obsessions. They’re all incredibly busy people working in different timezones doing an amazing job bringing the iconic Pogman back for old and new players alike, and we’re very excited for you to all start grabbing your Hobby Boxes and playing Pogs for Keeps once more. Have a listen to the full episode below to find out more from the team!
